Your Craft Site Takes 3.2 Seconds to Paint. You're Losing Buyers at Second Two.

Why Craft CMS Teams Start Looking at Astro

Craft CMS earned its reputation. The control panel is genuinely pleasant to use. Matrix fields give content teams flexible layouts without plugins. The GraphQL API works. Twig templating is clean. For a PHP-based CMS built on Yii2, Craft does a lot right.

The frontend story has limits, though. Twig templates render server-side on every request, which means your Lighthouse scores depend on PHP execution time, server caching layers, and how hard you push on asset optimization. Most Craft sites we audit land between 45-65 on mobile Lighthouse. Not terrible -- just not competitive when static-first frameworks exist.

The real friction shows up at scale. Craft's PHP/Yii2 stack forces frontend developers to context-switch between modern JavaScript tooling and Twig. Your deployment pipeline runs through PHP. Hosting requires a LAMP/LEMP stack or a managed service like Servd. Every page load hits the database unless you're layering on Redis, Blitz, or static caching plugins.

Astro eliminates all of that on the frontend side. Zero JavaScript by default. Static HTML at the edge. And when you need interactivity, you bring exactly the framework you want -- React, Vue, Svelte -- with island architecture that hydrates only what matters.

Two Migration Paths: Pick What Fits

We offer two distinct approaches depending on how invested you are in Craft's content modeling and admin experience.

Option A: Craft Headless + Astro Frontend

If your content team loves Craft's control panel -- and many do -- keep it. Craft's GraphQL API exposes entries, assets, globals, and custom fields. We strip out the Twig frontend entirely and build your site in Astro, pulling content via GraphQL at build time.

This gives you:

• Static HTML output deployed to Vercel or Cloudflare Pages
• Craft's admin stays exactly as your editors know it
• Incremental builds triggered by Craft webhooks on content save
• Edge delivery with sub-100ms TTFB globally

The tradeoff: you still maintain a PHP server for the Craft backend. Hosting costs stay in the $30-80/month range for managed Craft hosting. But your frontend performance becomes world-class.

Option B: Full Migration to Payload CMS + Astro

If you want to leave PHP entirely, we migrate your content model to Payload CMS -- a TypeScript-native CMS that runs on Node.js with MongoDB or Postgres. Payload's admin UI is React-based, highly customizable, and supports the same kind of flexible content modeling that makes Craft special.

This gives you:

• One language across the entire stack -- TypeScript everywhere
• Self-hosted or cloud with dramatically lower infrastructure complexity
• Built-in access control that matches or exceeds Craft's user permissions
• REST and GraphQL APIs out of the box
• No PHP dependency in your deployment pipeline

We map your Craft sections to Payload collections, migrate Matrix blocks to Payload's block fields, and transfer all content programmatically. Your editors get a modern admin that feels familiar within a day.

Converting Twig Templates to Astro Components

Craft sites use Twig for templating. Astro uses .astro components with a frontmatter script section and an HTML template section. The mapping is surprisingly clean:

• Twig {% include %} and {% embed %} become Astro component imports
• Twig {% for %} loops become JavaScript .map() in the template
• Twig {% if %} conditionals become ternary expressions or early returns
• Craft's entry.matrixField.all() queries become GraphQL fragments
• Asset transforms map to Astro's <Image /> component with Sharp optimization

We don't just translate syntax. We restructure your templates into a proper component architecture -- shared layouts, reusable UI primitives, and content-specific page templates. The result is a codebase any modern frontend developer can maintain without dusting off their Twig knowledge.

Handling Matrix Blocks

Matrix fields are Craft's killer feature, and they need careful migration. Each block type becomes either an Astro component (Option A) or a Payload block type plus Astro component (Option B). We build a block renderer that dynamically maps content blocks to components, preserving the editorial flexibility your team relies on.

SEO Preservation Strategy

Craft CMS sites typically have clean URL structures -- no .php extensions, no query parameters. That's good news for migration. Our process:

1. Full URL inventory -- We crawl your site and catalog every URL, redirect, canonical tag, and internal link
2. 1:1 route mapping -- Astro's file-based routing mirrors your existing URL structure exactly
3. 301 redirect map -- Any URLs that must change get permanent redirects configured at the edge
4. Meta tag transfer -- SEO titles, descriptions, OG tags, and structured data move to Astro's <head> management
5. XML sitemap generation -- Built automatically from your content at build time
6. Search Console monitoring -- We track indexing status for 90 days post-launch

Craft's SEOmatic plugin data gets extracted and mapped to your new Astro templates. No rankings left behind.

Our Migration Process

Week 1-2: Audit and Architecture We document your Craft installation -- content types, sections, Matrix blocks, asset volumes, plugins, custom modules, and any Yii2 customizations. We recommend Option A or B based on your team's technical direction and content workflow requirements.

Week 3-5: Build Astro frontend development begins. We convert Twig templates to Astro components, integrate with either Craft's GraphQL API or a new Payload CMS instance, and implement your design system. For Option B, content migration runs in parallel.

Week 6-7: Content Migration and QA Full content transfer (Option B), visual regression testing against your current site, performance benchmarking, and editorial team training on any new workflows.

Week 8: Launch DNS cutover, redirect verification, Search Console submission, and performance monitoring.

Learn more about our Astro development capabilities.

Timeline and Pricing

A typical Craft CMS to Astro migration runs 6-8 weeks.

• Option A (Craft Headless + Astro): $15,000-30,000 depending on template complexity and number of Matrix block types
• Option B (Payload CMS + Astro): $25,000-50,000 including full content model migration and CMS setup

Smaller sites with fewer than 20 templates and straightforward content models land at the lower end. Sites with complex Matrix configurations, multi-site setups, or Commerce integration require custom scoping.

Why Social Animal for This Migration

We've migrated PHP-based CMS platforms to headless architectures across dozens of projects. We know Craft's content model deeply -- including the edge cases around eager loading, element queries, and Matrix field nesting. And we build Astro sites that score 95+ on Lighthouse without sacrificing editorial flexibility.

Your content team shouldn't have to compromise. Your frontend performance shouldn't either.